Vietnam needs to spend more on R&D activities

There are numerous research & development (R&D) units in
Vietnam, but Vietnamese have few patent cooperation treaties (PCT)
registered at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the
English language news portal VietNamNet Bridge reported.

A report
of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) showed that about 2,000
organisations in Vietnam have R&D activities.

By the end of 2011, Vietnam had 134,780 R&D workers, accounting for 0.15 percent of the total population of 87.84 million.

Of
these, 105,230 do scientific research, while the others are technicians
and support staff. Over 50 percent of the scientific researchers, or
52,997 people, now work for universities.

Under the current
regulations, university lecturers have to spend 400-600 hours out of the
total 1,760 working hours a year on scientific research. This means
that lecturers spend 22-34 percent of their time only on scientific
research.

As such, Vietnam only has 15,000 people as FTE (full time equivalent) scientific researchers at universities.

Meanwhile,
the real figure is below 15,000, because university lecturers, instead
of spending the required time on doing scientific research, tend to
spend time on giving private tutoring lessons, which can bring them
extra money.

Vietnam has 67,223 real full-time scientific
researchers (15,000 at universities and about 53,000 at enterprises,
administration units and other organisations).

It appears that
67,223 Vietnamese researchers are not a small number. However, the ratio
of researchers per one million people in Vietnam is small – 0.0007 –
if noting that the ratio is 4,650 in the US (in 2007), 936 in China
(2011), 5,451 in the Republic of Korea (2010), Singapore 6,307 (2010)
and Malaysia 1,643 (2011).

This means that the US had 1.4 million
researchers by 2007, China 1.25 million by 2011, and the Republic of
Korea 265,809 by 2010, four times higher than Vietnam.

As for
technicians, according to MST, Vietnam had 9,781 technique workers by
2011, which means that there are 0.0001 technicians for every one
million people. The figure is dramatically low if compared with the
Republic of Korea (981 technicians per 1 million people in 2010), and
Malaysia (158/1 million).

The statistics showed that the number of researchers and technicians in Vietnam is too low.

According to MST, Vietnam spends much lower on R&D than other countries.

A
report of the ministry showed that in 2011, Vietnam’s GERD (Gross
domestic expenditure on research and development) was 5.293 trillion
VND, or 0.25 billion USD. This meant that the ratio of the expenditure
on GDP was 0.21 percent.

Meanwhile, the GERD index of the US was
2.77 percent in 2011, or 13 times higher than Vietnam’s. The total sum
of money the US spent on R&D activities was 450 billion USD, or
1,785 times higher than Vietnam.

China also spends much more
money than Vietnam on R&D activities. Chinese GERD was 1.84
percent in 2011, or 8.7 times higher than Vietnam’s. The country spent
250 billion USD on R&D, or 992 times higher than Vietnam./.